I Ain't You
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Week of Compassion
Story rated R for language.
Story Length -- 12.3 minutes approximate reading time, 3700 words.
I Ain’t You
by Robert P. Fugarino
God had crowned Lois's basketball-shaped head with a swirl of fuzzy, orange hair, and her hair was glorious. Church friends told Lois that, when the sunlight was behind her, she possessed a halo shaped from an autumn afternoon.
With a little effort but a lot of pride, Lois popped God's gift through the hole of her favorite sweater, a blue pull-over with silver starbursts printed across the front. Then her hands smoothed the sweater's heavy cotton against her flesh with three, quick moves—chest, sides, midriff.
“Nowadays that shirt hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said from his perch atop the hope chest on the other side of their bedroom.
Although Lois didn’t appreciate the judgment her husband packed into the words too tight, she knew that, in a certain way, Raymond was right. There was a bit more of her crammed into the sweater than there had been this time last year.
Lois removed her starburst sweater and cycled through two more tops, both of which Raymond vetoed without explanation. Finally, they settled on Lois’s green, shimmery blouse…with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left side of the collar. Lois insisted on the pin and stood her ground, even after Raymond labelled the pin sophomoric.
“It’s almost Christmas,” Lois told her husband. “I will have my candy cane pin.”
Lois and Raymond then debated through three skirts. Raymond said the first was too frumpy, the second called attention to the “camel-haunched bags” of her hips (whatever that meant). And, despite Lois’s longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not just right. But Raymond declared it would do well enough because now the passage of time was on his mind and, apparently, time was flowing faster than a white water rapid.
“Fucky-fuck, Lois. You’ve done us like you always do. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Late.” Raymond said all of this in a jokey, sing-song voice as he tapped his toe repeatedly, heavily on the hardwood floor.
Lois replayed the last few hours in her mind. Raymond hadn’t been concerned about timing and tardiness when she’d tried to move him along after dinner. His second cigar was too powerful a force to resist.
And Raymond hadn’t said anything about potential lateness when he’d watched his alma mater play football all the way to halftime in a bowl game named after a cough lozenge.
When Raymond had finally moved away from the TV and toward the bedroom to dress, he’d loudly grieved the loss of witnessing the game’s second half, and he’d concluded his lament with a flourish: “Lois, I will give up the second half as a sacrifice for the good of the church because it is Christmas-time and, if Jesus was willing to be born in a smelly stable, I can do this.”
Time and hurry hadn’t been on his mind then, but they were now, and so it was Fuck-Lois-Late.
Raymond and Lois left the house and began their drive to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk with one another, although Raymond spoke a little to himself. Lois could hear the tires grind random patches of ice and snow into the road.
She ventured a hand up to touch the window, and Lois wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December air and the speed of the car. Lois had performed this winter ritual regularly since childhood, and the experience had always sparked visions full of danger and adventure.
What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the searing cold? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moment between release and pavement, the moment of air and free flight, feel like?
Although she and her husband did not speak, even with just a fraction of her mind oriented away from the window and toward him, Lois knew Raymond had not reached a state of peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the driving conditions, slowed down far too dramatically. Over and over, he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.
And he continued to mutter. Not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s sharp-whispered words to himself became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.”
Lois and Raymond reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through the colored glass. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.
Lois let herself drink in the still scene as they walked toward to the front doors – settling snowflakes, sacred architecture, and a light that somehow looked noiseless glowing everywhere. Lois imagined a gold frame around what she saw. Pretending her face were a camera, Lois slowed her walk and snapped a mental picture by winking her left eye and making a quiet tic-kick noise with her mouth.
Raymond tugged at her elbow to urge her forward. Once, twice, and then a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the cement’s slick surface. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.
“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.
“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered.
“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean…damn.”
They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? Lois tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders.
32 years times 47 Sundays a year, give or take. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. That was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the total and gave up her calculations. It was a bunch of times.
The music was in full swing and candles flickered on the sill of every window. The smell of vanilla-scented wax and faux pine tree greeted her nose.
And the pews were full of people. This was a surprise to Lois, but the Lord had a taste for surprises. Or at least Lois had always believed this to be the case, and here was a smidge of evidence to go alongside the surprising story about the newborn Son of God sleeping in a box designed for animal feed.
As Lois and Raymond walked up the center aisle to their customary row, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all Christmas concerts.
Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by the unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, their seats. They’d always sat in the twelfth pew from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, upon the two red-cushioned spots farthest to the left. They’d always sat there. Everyone knew this was so. Lois suspected even the cushions knew it.
A few years back, she’d been in the sanctuary on a Monday afternoon, and she’d seen the indent of their buttocks still pressed into the fabric – the wide globe of her backside unmistakable, Raymond’s butt-print deeper on the left cheek because he crossed his legs to keep weight off the massive wallet in his back right pocket.
Lois and Raymond had been members of the church for over thirty years. Half of those years they’d given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they’d – praise be to God! – fully tithed. (In other words, they’d given 10% of their income to their congregation.)
At Raymond’s insisting, that 10% had been taken from after-tax income. Raymond said God understood you couldn’t control your taxes, and so the Lord adjusted for this. In Raymond’s mind, this history meant the two of them deserved the two seats, and the fellow churchgoers he’d consulted agreed.
But that was in the past. In the present, there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the spot next to the aisle, the place where Raymond sat Sunday after Sunday. Lois’s spot was filled by the man’s gigantic backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped beast with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.
The man matched his strange, dilapidated luggage. Lois had been taught to say this type of man was “living rough on the streets”, and yet here was the man – not on the streets, but in their seats. The stranger’s eyes were crammed shut, and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some cut-rate caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder.
With narrowed eyes, Lois looked from the choir to the mangy invader to Raymond and then back to the dirty man, and she was unprepared for all of it. She was not prepared for the man’s presence, his appearance, and the absurd realization that he was completely immersed and enveloped in the music of her church’s thoroughly unimpressive choir.
(Lois would never admit out loud that her church’s choir sucked, but they did suck, and this was the truth no matter how badly she wished otherwise.)
It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd, especially the stranger’s unalloyed enjoyment of the choir. Was he insane? Deaf? Both? Lois was in a mild state of shock, and she watched the scene from some distance, like she stood across the street from it.
Raymond’s experience of the present moment seemed vastly different. Raymond stared at the man as if trying to melt the stranger with heat-vision stolen from Superman. But the stranger did not melt.
In truth, the stranger, his eyes shut, appeared oblivious to their arrival. You could see by his lips that the singing had transported him somewhere sublime. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from a corn-colored overbite.
At this point, Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation, and a couple of people in the surrounding pews started noticing the developing situation, even as the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed.
Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow church members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling, outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”
Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him – no, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping.
But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away down a smooth-flowing river of praise.
Having failed, Raymond started to shake, just a little, and then more, and then still more, a pissed-off feedback loop triggered, cycling, intensifying. Then Raymond’s body began to vibrate with his swelling rage.
Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the half-dozen people closest to the drama. Raymond’s neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, as both the stranger’s bliss and the exile of Raymond’s ass continued, the red flush rose higher and higher into Raymond’s beardless face and hairless scalp.
Raymond reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs organizations use to keep track of their progress toward a fundraising goal. Their church had placed one in the lobby two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall.
You know what they look like. They utilize the image of old-timey mercury thermometers. Each week, as the donations come in, the red rises higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is reached, the thermometer blows its top.
Lois had always found the graphic foolish and unhelpful, not to mention subtly sexual. And, besides, who wants their mercury thermometer to rupture? Mercury is poisonous!
Nonetheless, her husband had become one of these thermometers, but he was a living one, and his red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when the thermometer burst, when her husband burst, the outcome would not be a new coat of paint for the fellowship hall or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts.
And still the dirty stranger swayed. Still her husband reddened and grew more rigid. Then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came out of his reverie and looked to his left, looked at Raymond, at Lois and, finally, back to Raymond once more.
In that moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary.
A wave of chaos broke over the congregation. Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantly. A few choir members started down the steps toward them. These were the good folks for whom crisis elicits the sacred desire to care. The situation was immediately, understandably out of hand.
Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her dead husband. Lois was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back, and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body on the tops of her shoes.
Powered by some instinct, Lois’s eyes focused not on her husband, but on the stranger. Quick as a leopard, the man leaned over her husband’s body, the tips of their noses touching, and he blew a great, breathy whisper into Raymond’s face. What the man said Lois could not decipher, but she could feel the heat of his breath through her stockings.
Then, just as the first wave of heroes started to press in, while everyone except Lois focused on Raymond’s body, the stranger rose, moved clear of Raymond, and toward an exit door. Lois watched him glide through the crowd unmolested. Then he was gone.
Through her shoes Lois felt her husband's flesh shift. It wasn’t the people jostling Raymond as they tried to coax him back to the land of the living. The movement came from inside Raymond. Lois knew this intuitively.
And then Raymond’s body shook. It was like someone had used an invisible set of the shock paddles Lois had seen TV doctors utilize while they shouted, “Clear!”
Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed he were trying to inhale them all. On his equally titanic exhale, as he returned from whatever dimension he’d so briefly visited, Raymond used his first breath to share a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear: “FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK!!!!”
So, Raymond lived, again. That much was clear, at least to Lois.
In that moment, it all clicked for her. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment Lois understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Not having any of it.
With the shot of adrenaline poured by her rebellion and anger, Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She stumbled into the parking lot, kicked off her high heels, and, playing a hunch, turned right and started to run.
Sprinting, gasping, her feet screaming as they numbed, Lois finally saw him, the stranger – the pew invader, the man supposedly from the street. He was still way ahead of her, walking casually up the road, his backpack receding into the deep December night.
To Lois’s eyes, his easy-going stride declared he thought he was now free and clear of her church and of her, but Lois shook her head, discovered another gear in the ancient engine of her body, and continued after him even faster than before. In Lois’s vision, the stranger’s back began to widen as she slowly gained on him.
Then, for Lois at least, everything slowed down in the most frustrating fashion. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never becomes more than the sliver on the horizon you spied during your first stroke.
The stranger’s steps became broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois could no longer gain on him, and she began to fear her own heart might give out. But, as Lois gave up all hope of overtaking him, the unthinkable happened. The dirty man stopped, turned, and faced her.
With a final, desperate forward lean of her torso, Lois caught him at last, and she grabbed ahold of the shabby fringe of his jacket. As she did, Lois realized he was wearing a black Members Only jacket. Even Lois knew that was uncool. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style it was almost in style once more. What would Raymond think of this?
Lois shook her head. “Focus, Lois. Focus,” she said out loud.
Having a hold on him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed her lungs to heave a few times in an attempt to recover from her sprint. A gob of spittle flew from her mouth onto the stranger’s right sleeve. The man watched its journey, but he didn’t seem disgusted or bothered. He made no attempt to break her hold on his jacket. Instead, now that Lois had caught him, he stood comfortably, amiably, shoulders relaxed, muscles loose, cosy as a cat napping in the sun.
Unblinking, Lois stared at him, and he returned the favor. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And I know what I know not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eyes-all-shut love for our choir’s singing. And our choir is garbage. Garbage! Only you could love their singing.”
The stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued talking and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control, level as a floorboard plank. Lois did not want to cower; she did not want to wail.
But Lois was angry beyond reason. Her anger radiated out of her gut. It felt like she’d swallowed the sun. But how much anger could she get away with? She was, after all, enraged at the one for whom Handel’s Messiah had been written and the church’s building raised.
Lois spoke. “I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. His damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it will.
“But I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will and farts out his bitchy words, his ice-cold touches, his dead-eyed stares.
“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could go back. Sure, I could.
“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places – like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. I know. I know.
“But I won’t go back. I love you. I worship you. I follow you. But I ain’t you. I ain’t. So, you gotta take me with you.”
With her last words launched, and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground, plopped her butt on the snowy road, and looked up into his eyes. He looked down at her.
Then he reached out his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t close enough for Lois to grab, unless she were willing to start scrambling to her feet to reach it.
He held his right hand out toward her with the palm up and open toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended his four fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”
Lois lifted herself and took his hand. They walked on, and the snow started to fall heavier all around them. Within moments their footprints had disappeared, swallowed by the storm.
Raymond died at the age of 107. He died on the 45th anniversary of what his congregation called (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Tragedy.”
Raymond died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last breath for the second time. When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed wife, his Lois.
Everyone who knew or knew of Raymond knew the story. Decades before, on a snowy and terrible December night, Lois’s insane, confused grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the frigid night, and she was never seen again.
It was a story lodged deep in both the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as Raymond could ever figure, there was only a single, silver lining to the tragedy, and it was this solitary slice of good news Raymond had repeated both to himself and to many, many others over the years.
Lois’s wild and desperate actions bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one. Raymond had been a man his wife so loved that the impact of losing him had driven her mad and then straight into the killing clutches of a lonely, frosty doom.
(A fable offered with appreciation and apologies to Alice Walker.)
by Robert P. Fugarino
God had crowned Lois's basketball-shaped head with a swirl of fuzzy, orange hair, and her hair was glorious. Church friends told Lois that, when the sunlight was behind her, she possessed a halo shaped from an autumn afternoon.
With a little effort but a lot of pride, Lois popped God's gift through the hole of her favorite sweater, a blue pull-over with silver starbursts printed across the front. Then her hands smoothed the sweater's heavy cotton against her flesh with three, quick moves—chest, sides, midriff.
“Nowadays that shirt hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said from his perch atop the hope chest on the other side of their bedroom.
Although Lois didn’t appreciate the judgment her husband packed into the words too tight, she knew that, in a certain way, Raymond was right. There was a bit more of her crammed into the sweater than there had been this time last year.
Lois removed her starburst sweater and cycled through two more tops, both of which Raymond vetoed without explanation. Finally, they settled on Lois’s green, shimmery blouse…with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left side of the collar. Lois insisted on the pin and stood her ground, even after Raymond labelled the pin sophomoric.
“It’s almost Christmas,” Lois told her husband. “I will have my candy cane pin.”
Lois and Raymond then debated through three skirts. Raymond said the first was too frumpy, the second called attention to the “camel-haunched bags” of her hips (whatever that meant). And, despite Lois’s longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not just right. But Raymond declared it would do well enough because now the passage of time was on his mind and, apparently, time was flowing faster than a white water rapid.
“Fucky-fuck, Lois. You’ve done us like you always do. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Late.” Raymond said all of this in a jokey, sing-song voice as he tapped his toe repeatedly, heavily on the hardwood floor.
Lois replayed the last few hours in her mind. Raymond hadn’t been concerned about timing and tardiness when she’d tried to move him along after dinner. His second cigar was too powerful a force to resist.
And Raymond hadn’t said anything about potential lateness when he’d watched his alma mater play football all the way to halftime in a bowl game named after a cough lozenge.
When Raymond had finally moved away from the TV and toward the bedroom to dress, he’d loudly grieved the loss of witnessing the game’s second half, and he’d concluded his lament with a flourish: “Lois, I will give up the second half as a sacrifice for the good of the church because it is Christmas-time and, if Jesus was willing to be born in a smelly stable, I can do this.”
Time and hurry hadn’t been on his mind then, but they were now, and so it was Fuck-Lois-Late.
Raymond and Lois left the house and began their drive to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk with one another, although Raymond spoke a little to himself. Lois could hear the tires grind random patches of ice and snow into the road.
She ventured a hand up to touch the window, and Lois wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December air and the speed of the car. Lois had performed this winter ritual regularly since childhood, and the experience had always sparked visions full of danger and adventure.
What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the searing cold? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moment between release and pavement, the moment of air and free flight, feel like?
Although she and her husband did not speak, even with just a fraction of her mind oriented away from the window and toward him, Lois knew Raymond had not reached a state of peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the driving conditions, slowed down far too dramatically. Over and over, he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.
And he continued to mutter. Not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s sharp-whispered words to himself became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.”
Lois and Raymond reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through the colored glass. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.
Lois let herself drink in the still scene as they walked toward to the front doors – settling snowflakes, sacred architecture, and a light that somehow looked noiseless glowing everywhere. Lois imagined a gold frame around what she saw. Pretending her face were a camera, Lois slowed her walk and snapped a mental picture by winking her left eye and making a quiet tic-kick noise with her mouth.
Raymond tugged at her elbow to urge her forward. Once, twice, and then a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the cement’s slick surface. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.
“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.
“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered.
“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean…damn.”
They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? Lois tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders.
32 years times 47 Sundays a year, give or take. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. That was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the total and gave up her calculations. It was a bunch of times.
The music was in full swing and candles flickered on the sill of every window. The smell of vanilla-scented wax and faux pine tree greeted her nose.
And the pews were full of people. This was a surprise to Lois, but the Lord had a taste for surprises. Or at least Lois had always believed this to be the case, and here was a smidge of evidence to go alongside the surprising story about the newborn Son of God sleeping in a box designed for animal feed.
As Lois and Raymond walked up the center aisle to their customary row, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all Christmas concerts.
Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by the unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, their seats. They’d always sat in the twelfth pew from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, upon the two red-cushioned spots farthest to the left. They’d always sat there. Everyone knew this was so. Lois suspected even the cushions knew it.
A few years back, she’d been in the sanctuary on a Monday afternoon, and she’d seen the indent of their buttocks still pressed into the fabric – the wide globe of her backside unmistakable, Raymond’s butt-print deeper on the left cheek because he crossed his legs to keep weight off the massive wallet in his back right pocket.
Lois and Raymond had been members of the church for over thirty years. Half of those years they’d given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they’d – praise be to God! – fully tithed. (In other words, they’d given 10% of their income to their congregation.)
At Raymond’s insisting, that 10% had been taken from after-tax income. Raymond said God understood you couldn’t control your taxes, and so the Lord adjusted for this. In Raymond’s mind, this history meant the two of them deserved the two seats, and the fellow churchgoers he’d consulted agreed.
But that was in the past. In the present, there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the spot next to the aisle, the place where Raymond sat Sunday after Sunday. Lois’s spot was filled by the man’s gigantic backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped beast with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.
The man matched his strange, dilapidated luggage. Lois had been taught to say this type of man was “living rough on the streets”, and yet here was the man – not on the streets, but in their seats. The stranger’s eyes were crammed shut, and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some cut-rate caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder.
With narrowed eyes, Lois looked from the choir to the mangy invader to Raymond and then back to the dirty man, and she was unprepared for all of it. She was not prepared for the man’s presence, his appearance, and the absurd realization that he was completely immersed and enveloped in the music of her church’s thoroughly unimpressive choir.
(Lois would never admit out loud that her church’s choir sucked, but they did suck, and this was the truth no matter how badly she wished otherwise.)
It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd, especially the stranger’s unalloyed enjoyment of the choir. Was he insane? Deaf? Both? Lois was in a mild state of shock, and she watched the scene from some distance, like she stood across the street from it.
Raymond’s experience of the present moment seemed vastly different. Raymond stared at the man as if trying to melt the stranger with heat-vision stolen from Superman. But the stranger did not melt.
In truth, the stranger, his eyes shut, appeared oblivious to their arrival. You could see by his lips that the singing had transported him somewhere sublime. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from a corn-colored overbite.
At this point, Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation, and a couple of people in the surrounding pews started noticing the developing situation, even as the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed.
Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow church members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling, outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”
Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him – no, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping.
But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away down a smooth-flowing river of praise.
Having failed, Raymond started to shake, just a little, and then more, and then still more, a pissed-off feedback loop triggered, cycling, intensifying. Then Raymond’s body began to vibrate with his swelling rage.
Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the half-dozen people closest to the drama. Raymond’s neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, as both the stranger’s bliss and the exile of Raymond’s ass continued, the red flush rose higher and higher into Raymond’s beardless face and hairless scalp.
Raymond reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs organizations use to keep track of their progress toward a fundraising goal. Their church had placed one in the lobby two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall.
You know what they look like. They utilize the image of old-timey mercury thermometers. Each week, as the donations come in, the red rises higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is reached, the thermometer blows its top.
Lois had always found the graphic foolish and unhelpful, not to mention subtly sexual. And, besides, who wants their mercury thermometer to rupture? Mercury is poisonous!
Nonetheless, her husband had become one of these thermometers, but he was a living one, and his red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when the thermometer burst, when her husband burst, the outcome would not be a new coat of paint for the fellowship hall or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts.
And still the dirty stranger swayed. Still her husband reddened and grew more rigid. Then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came out of his reverie and looked to his left, looked at Raymond, at Lois and, finally, back to Raymond once more.
In that moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary.
A wave of chaos broke over the congregation. Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantly. A few choir members started down the steps toward them. These were the good folks for whom crisis elicits the sacred desire to care. The situation was immediately, understandably out of hand.
Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her dead husband. Lois was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back, and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body on the tops of her shoes.
Powered by some instinct, Lois’s eyes focused not on her husband, but on the stranger. Quick as a leopard, the man leaned over her husband’s body, the tips of their noses touching, and he blew a great, breathy whisper into Raymond’s face. What the man said Lois could not decipher, but she could feel the heat of his breath through her stockings.
Then, just as the first wave of heroes started to press in, while everyone except Lois focused on Raymond’s body, the stranger rose, moved clear of Raymond, and toward an exit door. Lois watched him glide through the crowd unmolested. Then he was gone.
Through her shoes Lois felt her husband's flesh shift. It wasn’t the people jostling Raymond as they tried to coax him back to the land of the living. The movement came from inside Raymond. Lois knew this intuitively.
And then Raymond’s body shook. It was like someone had used an invisible set of the shock paddles Lois had seen TV doctors utilize while they shouted, “Clear!”
Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed he were trying to inhale them all. On his equally titanic exhale, as he returned from whatever dimension he’d so briefly visited, Raymond used his first breath to share a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear: “FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK!!!!”
So, Raymond lived, again. That much was clear, at least to Lois.
In that moment, it all clicked for her. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment Lois understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Not having any of it.
With the shot of adrenaline poured by her rebellion and anger, Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She stumbled into the parking lot, kicked off her high heels, and, playing a hunch, turned right and started to run.
Sprinting, gasping, her feet screaming as they numbed, Lois finally saw him, the stranger – the pew invader, the man supposedly from the street. He was still way ahead of her, walking casually up the road, his backpack receding into the deep December night.
To Lois’s eyes, his easy-going stride declared he thought he was now free and clear of her church and of her, but Lois shook her head, discovered another gear in the ancient engine of her body, and continued after him even faster than before. In Lois’s vision, the stranger’s back began to widen as she slowly gained on him.
Then, for Lois at least, everything slowed down in the most frustrating fashion. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never becomes more than the sliver on the horizon you spied during your first stroke.
The stranger’s steps became broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois could no longer gain on him, and she began to fear her own heart might give out. But, as Lois gave up all hope of overtaking him, the unthinkable happened. The dirty man stopped, turned, and faced her.
With a final, desperate forward lean of her torso, Lois caught him at last, and she grabbed ahold of the shabby fringe of his jacket. As she did, Lois realized he was wearing a black Members Only jacket. Even Lois knew that was uncool. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style it was almost in style once more. What would Raymond think of this?
Lois shook her head. “Focus, Lois. Focus,” she said out loud.
Having a hold on him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed her lungs to heave a few times in an attempt to recover from her sprint. A gob of spittle flew from her mouth onto the stranger’s right sleeve. The man watched its journey, but he didn’t seem disgusted or bothered. He made no attempt to break her hold on his jacket. Instead, now that Lois had caught him, he stood comfortably, amiably, shoulders relaxed, muscles loose, cosy as a cat napping in the sun.
Unblinking, Lois stared at him, and he returned the favor. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And I know what I know not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eyes-all-shut love for our choir’s singing. And our choir is garbage. Garbage! Only you could love their singing.”
The stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued talking and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control, level as a floorboard plank. Lois did not want to cower; she did not want to wail.
But Lois was angry beyond reason. Her anger radiated out of her gut. It felt like she’d swallowed the sun. But how much anger could she get away with? She was, after all, enraged at the one for whom Handel’s Messiah had been written and the church’s building raised.
Lois spoke. “I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. His damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it will.
“But I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will and farts out his bitchy words, his ice-cold touches, his dead-eyed stares.
“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could go back. Sure, I could.
“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places – like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. I know. I know.
“But I won’t go back. I love you. I worship you. I follow you. But I ain’t you. I ain’t. So, you gotta take me with you.”
With her last words launched, and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground, plopped her butt on the snowy road, and looked up into his eyes. He looked down at her.
Then he reached out his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t close enough for Lois to grab, unless she were willing to start scrambling to her feet to reach it.
He held his right hand out toward her with the palm up and open toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended his four fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”
Lois lifted herself and took his hand. They walked on, and the snow started to fall heavier all around them. Within moments their footprints had disappeared, swallowed by the storm.
Raymond died at the age of 107. He died on the 45th anniversary of what his congregation called (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Tragedy.”
Raymond died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last breath for the second time. When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed wife, his Lois.
Everyone who knew or knew of Raymond knew the story. Decades before, on a snowy and terrible December night, Lois’s insane, confused grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the frigid night, and she was never seen again.
It was a story lodged deep in both the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as Raymond could ever figure, there was only a single, silver lining to the tragedy, and it was this solitary slice of good news Raymond had repeated both to himself and to many, many others over the years.
Lois’s wild and desperate actions bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one. Raymond had been a man his wife so loved that the impact of losing him had driven her mad and then straight into the killing clutches of a lonely, frosty doom.
(A fable offered with appreciation and apologies to Alice Walker.)